Heraldry

The sixteenth entry is o brasão falante, and it is one of the places where Portuguese is transparent and English is not. Falante is simply speaking, so the name says at once what the thing does: the shield carries an object whose name is the bearer’s name — a castle for a family called Castelo, a pear tree for one called Pereira. French, Spanish and Italian all build the term the same way. English does not. It calls them « canting arms », and the word doing the work is a verb almost nobody now uses in that sense. « To cant » meant to speak, and it belonged to the vocabulary of beggars and thieves — « thieves’ cant » is still the name of that jargon — from which English also kept « cant » for pious talk its speaker does not mean. None of this shows in the phrase. Worse, there is a second and quite unrelated « cant », meaning to tilt or to slope, so a reader who reaches for that one has understood a shield set at an angle.